About two months ago, I read this great article on abiogenesis in ice in Discover magazine: "Did Life Evolve in Ice?"
Of all the recent things I've read about abiogenesis, this is one of the better ones from a chemist's perspective. The crux is that even though the kinetics of reactions slow down at low T, the entropy is low and concentrations are increased by the formation of pockets within ice crystals:
This is the main argument against Miller’s experiment, and against a cold origin of life in general. But strange things happen when you freeze chemicals in ice. Some reactions slow down, but others actually speed up—especially reactions that involve joining small molecules into larger ones. This seeming paradox is caused by a process called eutectic freezing. As an ice crystal forms, it stays pure: Only molecules of water join the growing crystal, while impurities like salt or cyanide are excluded. These impurities become crowded in microscopic pockets of liquid within the ice, and this crowding causes the molecules to collide more often. Chemically speaking, it transforms a tepid seventh-grade school dance into a raging molecular mosh pit.
“Usually as you cool things, the reaction rates go down,” concluded Leslie Orgel, who studied the origins of life at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, from the 1960s until his death last October. “But with eutectic freezing, the concentrations go up so fast that they more than make up” for the difference.
Cyanide is a good candidate as a precursor molecule in the life-in-a-freezer model for several reasons. First, planetary scientists suspect that cyanide was abundant on early Earth, deposited here by comets or created in the atmosphere by ultraviolet light or by lightning (once the atmosphere became oxygen rich, 2.5 billion years ago, the process would have stopped). Second, although cyanide is lethal to modern animals, it has a convenient tendency to self-assemble into larger molecules. Third, and perhaps most important, no matter how much cyanide rained down, it could become concentrated only in a cold environment—not in warm coastal lagoons—because it evaporates more quickly than water.
